Category: Roads
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Dust Bowl Adventure, Part 3 (Geo-Oddities Overflowing)
I completed an epic day of geo-oddity exploration earlier this week during the Dust Bowl trip. An Initial Cluster The first cluster sat near Black Mesa at the far northwestern corner of the Oklahoma panhandle. This small area may be unique in the state from a geographical perspective, with genuine mesas replacing more typical flat…
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Dust Bowl Adventure, Part 2 (Sea of Grass)
An odd feature of my Dust Bowl trip is that I drive for hours with little or nothing to see beyond the awesome natural beauty of the Great Plains until it’s punctuated by a tightly-bound space overflowing with geographic anomalies and historical sites. One such place is Morton County in the far southwestern corner of…
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Dust Bowl Adventure, Part 1 (Getting There)
It was a long time coming and I’d talked about it since last autumn. The Dust Bowl trip finally arrived. We flew to Denver, Colorado as our starting point. Certainly there were closer airports, however none of the others had non-stop flights or cheaper fares. I viewed it as an opportunity to capture some previously…
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Three Notches
Marks on trees served as road signs during North America’s colonial times, a period when much of the population was illiterate. Certain patterns of slashes or notches conveyed specific information about the nature of a pike or landmarks a traveler might find farther down down its path. Three notches served as a frequent glyph although…
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The Other Mount Vernon
I posted an article a few days ago that I called The Other White House. I thought I was being rather topical by posting it on Presidents Day, featuring a bunch of White Houses that shared nothing in common with the famous one in Washington, DC except for a name. So I felt pretty smug,…
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Impressive Pedestrian Bridges
Plans change. I gamble when I choose to mull over a thought and allow it to percolate in my mind. Sometimes the delay results in a better article. Other times, events overtake ideas not completely formed yet. Loyal reader “Rhodent” and I were communicating by email about a potential offshoot of “NOT as the Crow…
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Starting from Zero
I used the Zero Milestone marker in Washington, DC as the center of my circle a few weeks ago in Odds and Ends 6. It occurred to me that maybe I’d not talked about this marker before. That seemed odd in itself. That’s because I include it on all of my DC tours for friends…
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Name That Smell
Smells have a way of sticking with people. Everyone knows when they drive past a petrochemical factory, a paper mill, a landfill or a sewage treatment plant. The geographic location becomes lodged in one’s mind with a full set of highly-charged negative associations. I’m going to toss all of those aside. Instead I’m flipping the…
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Pick a Lane. Any Lane
Roads. I’ve been thinking about roads a lot lately. I’m not sure how that morphed into a search for the road with the most lanes, but that’s where it ended this evening. San Diego, California, USA Lots of other people have wondered the same thing. That allowed me to cherry-pick various lists and collections for…
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NOT as the Crow Flies
All due credit for the article today goes to a reader using the pseudonym “Wangi.” He sent me an email message offline noting an interesting situation, which by implication suggested the basis for another contest. I even stole the title of the current article from him. Thank you, Wangi! There’s nothing unusual going on here,…